What does it mean to identify a particular person as Bengali as opposed to Tamil? The answer is that there is an assertion of an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' or arbitrary basis on which to differentiate two or more people. Thus being descended from Bengalis is arbitrary because one could just as easily have been descended from Tamils. So is having been born and brought up in Bengal. After all, you could just as easily have been born and brought up in Tamil Nadu. Having Bengali as a mother tongue or having been educated and domiciled in Bengal may also qualify one as a Bengali though perhaps of a hyphenated sort.
Amartya Sen takes a different view in his paper 'on being a Bengali'. He says 'any perceived identity, including that of being a Bengali, need not close people’s options and lock them up with some unique bundle of specific characteristics.' Sadly, this is not the case for a 'perceived' identity which is alethic, or based on facts. Sen is perceived as Bengali because he is of Bengali descent. He would be considered insane if he went around saying - 'I don't have a unique Mummy and Daddy any more than I have a unique gender . I have many Mummies and Daddies. I am just as much the Queen of England as I am a Bengali Economist.'
Sen asks 'Can we – perhaps roughly – consider some elements of the pool of particularities that being a Bengali may plausibly include?' The answer is yes. I have listed those elements. If none are present, the person is not Bengali.
Sen takes a different view. He thinks there may be 'historically linked characteristics' which it would be 'useful to consider and think about when trying to focus on the general identification of being a Bengali'. He is mistaken. Characteristics like whom your Mummy and Daddy were are arbitrary. The aren't 'historically linked' unless, obviously, they were Kings and Queens. Thus, a person of purely German descent and upbringing may be English, not German, by virtue of having inherited the English throne. Otherwise, if they are a mere commoner, they have a German identity by virtue of descent, though they may have a hyphenated identity by virtue of naturalization as a 'German-American' etc.
What Sen is talking about is not Bengali identity but Bengali cultural or psychological traits. The same person can have different traits at different times, but their identity remains the same. This does mean that people should pursue 'bourgeois strategies' based on 'uncorrelated asymmetries' of an arbitrary type which give them a unique, rather than a multiple, identity. It is an arbitrary matter that my name is Vivek Iyer rather than Amartya Sen. I may feel that I am actually Amartya Sen and thus entitled to drain his Bank account. But I am not Sen. I am Iyer even though I share his trait of writing tedious bollocks.
I suppose if Bengal was unique in some non arbitrary way- for example if its geography or history or racial composition or economic or political regime or language, religion or culture was markedly different from contiguous areas- then we might speak of non-arbitrary or 'natural' markers of Bengali identity quite separate from such contingent factors as who your parents were or what their mother tongue was. In other words, there would be a Bengali 'essence' which would itself endow the intension or category of 'Bengali' with a unique extension or well defined set.
So what makes Bengali history unusual in a big or a small way?
Nothing. At its borders it shades imperceptibly into its neighbours.
First, when Buddhism disappeared from India
including Bengal
after nearly a thousand years of being dominant in the country,
it was only 'dominant' under Buddhist Emperors. But their successors or predecessors tended to support other sects.
it continued to remain powerful and influential in Bengal for some more centuries.
but died by about the 11th century. Yet it kept going to Bengal's North and East- areas not conquered by Muslims. Bengal is similar to the rest of India in this respect. Sen himself is a Baidya. It is believed that the Baidyas came from what is now Andhra Pradesh. They retain no trace, impress, or recollection of Buddhism. I should mention the Buddhist/Shaivite Pala dynasty was replaced by the Hindu Sen dynasty. The Sens came from South India. Their rule lasted 160 years.
The Buddhist Pala kings
who also patronized Shaivism.
ruled over Bengal for four centuries and were ultimately subdued in the twelfth century.
Eleventh. The Sens took power in 1070.
Since Muslim rulers took control of Bengal in the thirteenth century, there was only a rather brief interlude
160 years is not so brief
of Hindu rule in Bengal in between Buddhist governance and Muslim dominance.
Muslim dominance did not translate into cultural or religious hegemony for the vast majority of the population. Thus Sen's Vaidya ancestors were only affected by a common sub-continental Hinduism. There was no Buddhist and little Muslim influence on them or, indeed, on the 'bhadralok' at large.
Many features of Bengali culture, including the all-important Bengali language, emerged in the ending days of Buddhist Bengal and were nurtured in the transition years.
Most contemporary languages emerged around that time and continued to change and evolve. Since Buddhism was not native to Bengal, it can't represent its essence. Nor can proto-Bengali which was merely a descendant of Sanskrit brought in by invaders and immigrants.
The importance of Buddhist influence on Bengali culture is very unlike – indeed generally much stronger – than in the rest of India.
It is non-existent save at Bengal's borders. It was the British, not the bhadralok, who rediscovered Buddhism and raised its prestige in its country of origin. By then, most Bengali Hindus thought what was distinctive about their own religious habitus was 'Shakta' devotion to the Goddess.
This can be observed in Bengal’s history of beliefs, language, literature, arts and architecture.
This wasn't observed by Bengalis. At a later time, it was British archaeologists who established that such and such ruin was Buddhist in origin often on the basis of accounts left by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims.
Second, the shipping routes to and from Bengal were well established for a very long time.
But the 'bhadralok' were landlubbers. Indeed, many of them- like the Sen's- had moved to Bengal from inland areas. They were ignorant and uninterested in Buddhism or the customs of the Malays or Khmers etc.
Even the early Chinese visitor, Faxian (Fahsien), who had come to India in 401 A.D.
at least four centuries before Sen's people turned up
by the northern land route from China (he took two years to reach India, coming via Khotan and Afghanistan), returned through Bengal after his ten years in India, sailing from Tamralipta (or Tamluk, which is quite close to modern Calcutta), and he went first from Bengal to Sri Lanka, then to Java, and then finally got home to China (the trading connections with all these regions were well established in those ancient days).
But those 'ancient days' have left no impress on Sen's Bengal just as the Druids had left no impress upon the England in which Sen studied and taught.
The mouth of the Ganges near today’s Calcutta was the point of export of many products of Bengal, particularly cotton textiles, which were well-known in the world, including Europe, but also of commodities obtained further north (like saltpetre from Patna), which were sent down the Ganges to be shipped out from Bengal. The lucrative trade and commerce of the region was, of course, the reason why the European trading firms originally came there.
This was also the reason they came to Madras and Bombay whose hinterlands too had once been Buddhist strongholds.
This included the East India Company, which would later go on to establish what would become Britain’s Indian empire.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. The Brits made Calcutta, not Madras or Bombay, the Capital of their Indian Empire. For more than a century it could claim to be 'the second city' of the greatest Empire the world had ever been seen. This period of pre-eminence ended some twenty years before Sen was born but Calcutta remained the richest and most developed city in India till about 1960. What made the Bengali bhadralok unusual was that some of their leading families had risen, as compradors, from clerical to aristocratic status. Thus one can speak of Bengali as the common language of both a bildungsburgertum and a haut bourgeoisie which remained in a comprador relationship to the European metropole. This was not the case for other vernaculars.
Sen next speaks of East Bengal which however now has a separate identity as Bangladesh. Clearly nothing true of East Bengal which isn't true of the West could be essential to Bengali identity. Amusingly, Sen speaks of Hindu Muslim cooperation as a Bengali trait though Hindus have had to run away from the East. It appears he lives in a fantasy world.
Third, there is something very special about the Bengali calendar, called the “San.”
There is something special about every regional calendar to people of that region. But, speaking generally, they don't care who created it.
It is the only extant calendar in which the influence of Emperor Akbar’s abortive attempt at establishing an all-Indian multi-religious calendar, the Tarikh-Ilahi, survives.
So what? Few Bengalis are aware of this. None, apart from Sen, give a fuck. The thing is wholly inconsequential. In any case, Bengali priests and astrologers use panchangam same as other Hindus.
Fourth, the Bengali language has some special features unlike most Indian languages, and to the development of these features, Hindus and Muslims both seem to have contributed substantially.
Punjabi and the Urdu or khari bholi of the Doab have more.
A striking specialness relates to the non-use of gender in Bengali –
because it was less developed and only acquired a literature after gender had been lost.
the absence of male-female distinctions, particularly in the form of the verbs. In the emerging days of the newly born Bengali language, it lost the traditional features of gender division – so important in Sanskrit.
But not important in the vulgar tongue. Little is expected, in terms of grammar and syntax, of peasants or fishermen.
The male and the female verbs – and often the nouns as well – seem to have a genderneutral form in the emerging Bengali language – rather similar, in this respect, to the linguistic features of the Turkish language.
Bengali, like English and Persian, lost gender. The Uralic language may never have had the thing.
The dropping of gender (departing rather sharply from Sanskrit)
but not from vulgar Prakrits spoken in less developed regions.
is seen in the evolution of the eastern branch of Prakrit – the Magadhi Prakrit – in taking the momentous
wholly meaningless
step of dispensing with genderized articulation, including doing away with the distinction between male and female forms of verbs.
but the learned and affluent were careful to write grammatically in Sanskrit.
A similar transformation was happening in Oriya and Assamese as well, which also derived from Magadhi Prakrit. The genderlessness of early Bengali classics was widely noted in that rapidly growing literature, authored both by Hindu and Muslim writers.
No it wasn't. Furthermore such writers did not express their support for Homosexual marriage and increased representation of Lesbians in the armed forces.
I should add here that though the Hindus and Muslims cooperated in this linguistic evolution, so did many of the Adivasi parts of the local population, which had shunned genderized language, for a long time preceding the emergence of early Bengali.
In which case, the loss of gender in Bengali is likely to correspond to its lack in previously prevailing indigenous languages.
My grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, who
worked only with Hindus
repeatedly made the important cultural point that the real issue in the good relations between Hindus and Muslim is not mutual tolerance, but cooperative joint work.
Which he did not engage in. It turned out, Hindus needed to cooperate with each other to defend themselves from Muslims who were cooperating with each other to kill kaffirs. Admittedly, what was easier was ignominious flight to Hindu majority areas so as to become a free-rider on the collective security for Hindus which the locals provided.
It is also important to recollect how integrated the Muslim courts in Bengal were in including Hindus.
Like the Mughal court.
It is not only that the translation of the Sanskrit epics – Ramayana and Mahabharata – into Bengali was commissioned by Muslim kings of Bengal.
Translation into Persian was commissioned by the Mughal King Akbar. The Bengali Ramayana may have been composed during the reign of the Hindu King Ganesha. The Kavindra Mahabharata probably was commissioned by a Muslim Governor. However, since this was happening elsewhere, this is not an argument for Bengali uniqueness. On the contrary, since East Bengal's Muslims have persecuted Hindus with vim and vigour, it appears the thing was wholly inconsequential.
This seemed to have begun in the fourteenth century, and these early Bengali translations are still among the most read versions of these ancient epics. There are moving accounts of how one of these Muslim kings wanted to hear those old Sanskrit stories again and again every evening.
There are even more moving accounts of Muslims slaughtering Hindus- unless they- like Sen's family- had been beforehand in running away.
The Muslim kings were not, of course, abandoning their own Islamic beliefs in any way whatever, but they were also establishing non-religious affiliations
e.g. ruling Hindus. The Brits too established such 'non-religious affiliations'. Sadly, the Japanese were not permitted, by Churchill, to gain the non-religious affiliation of enslaving Bengalis. That's why the Bengalis still hate Churchill.
in addition to their own religiosity, showing – seven hundred years ago – that a person’s religious identity need not overwhelm every other aspect of a person’s life and attachments.
Nor did their sexuality. In the Krittivasi Ramayana two women have lesbian sex and conceive a child. However this was because such was God's will. It had nothing to do with a 'secular understanding of Bengali jointness'. In any case, even if such a thing had existed hundreds of years ago, it was obvious it no longer did. Otherwise, why did Sen's family abandon Dacca and run away to Hindu majority India?
Sen thinks this was because of 'pushing of communal poison'.
through the early years of the 1940s...
Yet, Premier Fazl ul Haq, heading a 'secular' party, presented the Pakistan Resolution in 1940. Sadly, the Hindu majority parts of Bengal and Punjab did not want to be massacred or forcibly converted by the Muslims which is why those provinces were partitioned.
The first election that the Muslim League won was in 1946
they had already formed a Ministry in 1943. But Fazl ul Haq, who became Premier in 1937, presented the Lahore Resolution demanding separate states for Muslim majority provinces.
– immediately preceding the partition.
Which Hindus wanted because Muslims kept killing them.
Rabindranath put the principal diagnosis in very clear terms in his Hibbert Lectures at Oxford in the early 1930s. When he stated, with some evident pride, that he came from “a confluence of three cultures, Hindu, Mohammedan and British,”
why did he not mention Buddhism as well? Was it because Buddhism was regarded as part of Hinduism? The other obvious point is that if other Bengalis came from this confluence of cultures they wanted at least two of them to separate and go their separate ways. Sen's family did not remain in Muslim majority East Pakistan. They ran away to Hindu majority India. Why? They had a Hindu identity. They did not have a composite Hindu, Muslim and British identity. Sen is a citizen of India and only India because India does not permit dual citizenship.
this was both an explicit negation of any sectarian identification,
it may have been 'explicit' but it was mendacious. Tagore was Hindu. He warned the Hindus that they must unite against the Muslims and the Christians.
and an implicit celebration of the dignity of being broad-based, rather than narrowly confined.
Slaves are welcome to celebrate their broad-based dignity while sucking off their masters.
That historic understanding was widely appreciated in Bengali literature and culture.
Which is why there was ethnic cleansing and partition the moment the Brits began to withdraw.
In the 1940s, the cultivation of communalism may have begun with rather mild advocacy of divisiveness,
The 1926 Hindu Muslim riots set a pattern repeated in 1946 and 1964.
but violence and bloodshed found their way of spreading rapidly over the years that immediately followed.
Sen is from East Bengal. When he was born, Hindus were about 30 percent of the population there. Now, they are less than 8 percent. Under Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, Hindus are once again being attacked. This is the fault of the RSS- right?
In the new India of today the promotion of flammable doctrines of the RSS and the Hindutva movements, with minorities under attack for alleged misbehaviour seen in a very sectarian perspective (for example, through wanting to punish the eating or storing of beef), violence can erupt easily enough.
More has erupted in Bangladesh where there is no RSS.
With tension building in some neighbouring states as Assam, about the checking of citizenship,
mandated by the Bench which also suo moto opened detention centres
and the temptation to use the religious card to lure people into more and more divisiveness in Bengal itself,
Does Sen condemn the Muslim League? Is he a critic of the Islamic Republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh? No. He is critical only of the country where his family gained asylum.
the dangers of slipping into raw violence in communal lines (whether or not mediated by the politics of the cow) can be very real.
Which is why Sen's family abandoned its East Bengali identity and ran away to Hindu majority India.
The possibility of tragic violence does not, of course, remove the potential for a just and peaceful society that various ingredients of a Bengali identity brings to us through hundreds of years of history.
It has done in Sen's ancestral East Bengal. Why? Muslims don't like kaffirs. That's why Sen's family ran the fuck away.
It may not be an insurance against calamities,
The existence of a Muslim majority in the East was a guarantee that Hindus there would face calamity- unless they ran the fuck away.
but it continues to carry the resources for building a good society,
not by Bengalis. They are useless.
once the demons of hatred and violence are subdued.
Running away from demons does not subdue them. On the other hand, it is true that Sen ran away with his best friend's wife who was Italian. Some confluences, it seems, are better than others and Bengali identity, in Sen's case, flourishes most after the securing of a Green Card.
Sen tells us of
a real event
i.e. a made-up story
reported by Kshiti Mohan Sen, my grandfather, whose work on joint and cooperative activities of Hindus and Muslims I have used before.
The story draws on the common Bengali scepticism of priests and pretensions.
If such a scepticism really existed, there would be no priests or monks or nuns- like Mother Theresa- in Bengal.
The event occurred on an evening in the village of Sonarang in Bikrampur,
from which Hindus would have to run away
when Kshiti Mohan’s elder brother, Abanimohan, was chatting with a close friend of him – a Muslim priest – called Mahafizuddin, at the home of the latter, while sharing a smoke from a hubblebubble together.
Were they also sodomizing each other? If not, was it because they were homophobic? Surely, there was a confluence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Homosexuality in Bengal?
They saw a Hindu priest, called Chakravarty, going past, and Mahafizuddin warmly invited him to join them for a smoke. “We are having a great time – please join us!” said the Maulavi. Chakravarty declined, and pointed to the difference between him – a spotless Brahmin priest – and his inviter, the Muslim Maulavi. “Remember, I am a holy priest – and you are not: we are altogether different,” Chakravarty insisted.
This was quite true. Hindu priests are meant to maintain ritual purity. They are not meant to smoke or drink or get Gay with low caste Baidyas or Muslims.
The Maulavi replied: “My friend, there is no real difference between us. You live by exploiting the vulnerabilities of poor, ignorant Hindus,
who want their priests to maintain ritual purity
and I live by exploiting the vulnerabilities of poor, ignorant Muslims.
In which case the Maulvi was a 'munafiq' deserving of death according to Sharia law
We are engaged in exactly the same business.”
Sen does not understand that his great-uncle is engaged in anti-Muslim propaganda. The Hindu priest is shown as maintaining ritual purity. The Muslim maulvi is depicted as a cynical hypocrite.
Being a Bengali may not give us an insurance against a calamity
the cowardly habit of running away may do so
(and that is a warning particularly worth remembering in the present difficult times), but it does encourage many attractive ideas, including the sharing of some harmless amusement.
e.g. saying Maulvis are cynical hypocrites. This is only a harmless amusement in non-Muslim majority areas.
Sen abandoned his chaste Bengali wife to run off with a twice divorced Italian. He ends his lecture thus-
As Siddhacharja Bhusuku puts it: I have steered the thunder-boat along the course of Padda. The pirates have robbed me of my misery. Bhusuku, today you have become a true “Bangalee” Having taken a Chandal woman as your wife.
Clearly the true Bengali is someone you can rob with impunity. Moreover, such a person will be happy to marry a woman while belittling her by using a casteist epithet. If some nice foreigner also sodomizes the 'true Bangalee', his cup of joy will surely overflow.
A sense of detachment from property and caste seemed to be central to Bhusuku’s idea of being a Bengali.
All monks and mystics are detached from property and caste. Referring to your wife as belonging to a despised group or boasting of your cowardice however may fit a particular conception of Bengali identity. But why would any Bengali want such a thing?
There is a big influence of Buddhist thought here,
Essence of Buddhism is to shack up with a prostitute- right?
but that is generally true of early Bengal in many different ways. I should explain that there is an ambiguity here, because in those days in the eleventh century, Bengali (or Vangali, as it was denoted then) often meant residents of a specific part of Bengal – in particular Dhaka and Faridpur – rather than people from anywhere in Bengal.
So, Sen has an East Bengali trait. West Bengalis are welcome to despise him.
But there is clearly an attempt here to perhaps think about how a true Bengali should consider living.
Abandon your well-born wife and shack up with a filthy tart.
There certainly is a vision here – something to cherish and seek.
in non-Muslim majority areas or, better yet, Yurop-Amrika
That thousand-year old search has interesting and important implications for our time as well.
It really doesn't. Bengal became unable to feed and defend itself. Some nice Pakistani general vowed to change the 'nasl' (i.e. DNA) of the East Bengalis by killing the men and raping the women. Sadly, the Indian Army prevented this outcome.
There may be no insurance here, but perhaps some inspiration in being a Bengali
Sen's lecture inspires hatred and contempt for East Bengali Hindus like himself. I suppose he is terrified that India's Hindus might do something to help Hindus in Bangladesh thus denying him the opportunity to laugh heartily at their misfortunes. Truly, nothing can be sweeter than the schadenfreude of the expat economist who continues to prescribe calamitous policy prescriptions for his impoverished people not out of a duty to virtue signal but a desire to gloat over their miserable condition.
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